We have started reading the novel Fahrenheit 451 in class. The story follows Guy Montag, a fireman who burns books for a living. The story is set in a near-future world, where books are banned, mindless entertainment is encouraged, and free thought and speech is frowned upon. The novel was written by Ray Bradbury and was published in 1953, during the height of the Cold War, and just after the end of World War 2. Today, I’ll be focusing on the context and history that inspired Bradbury to write this novel.
The first historical event that Bradbury took inspiration from was the Nazi book burnings. When the Nazi Party came into power in 1933, they tried to suppress dissent and control German culture in all forms. This culminated in Nazi youth leaders confiscating books from public libraries, and eventually, personal collections. Confiscated books included anything that went against Nazi values, including famous books by Hellen Keller, H.G. Wells, and Ernest Hemingway. that the These confiscated books were piled together and burned, and these events continued well into World War 2.
Bradbury was shocked by these book burnings. He saw them as an attack on the thing he loved most, and said, “The reason why I wrote Fahrenheit is that I am a library person and I am in danger of someday writing something that people might not like and they might burn.” The book was very personal for him, and ironically, became one of the most banned books in the world.
In addition, Americans experienced the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Named after the most famous practitioner, this practice was used to seek out and repress those with Communist ideologies during the Cold War. People were arrested and detained without being charged, and then interrogated, facing the threat of jail time or unemployment if they didn’t cooperate. The whole campaign was taken too far, with political tests imposed everywhere, and people even being arrested based on their social circles and art they owned. Bradbury was very worried by these developments, and took inspiration from the situation: “I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where all thinking stops.., and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.”
I think both of these situations are representative of the power of books and art. Burning books represents the repression of free speech- totalitarians need complete control, and books have the power to make people think and therefore undermine their regimes. In addition, repressing freedom of speech can have terrible consequences- however well-intentioned, it can easily spiral out of control. Both of these events serve to remind us of the dangers of suppressing dissent, and Bradbury weaves these two ideas together into a beautiful story.